Policy changes needed for the regenerative agriculture in the US food system
Changing government policy is critical for wide-spread transition to regenerative agriculture. In the US, current policy is a complex web of infrastructure that incentivizes chemical-dependent agriculture and makes it challenging for regenerative farmers to transition. In many countries, government policy explicitly favors export-oriented monoculture, which affords the ability to purchase desirable imports, but has many risky implications for economic and ecosystem sustainability.
US policy
In the US, I see several major areas of policy change:
- Crop Insurance
- Conservation Programs
- Research and Extension
- Trade policy
- Carbon markets
Some background: The US farm bill is a $500 billion omnibus legislation that is reauthorized by Congress every five years. The most recent iteration, which was just signed into law, highlights just how far it reaches — from SNAP (food stamp) requirements to crop insurance and commodity supports, from mental health resources in farming communities to environmental conservation programs. It’s so complicated that food policy expert Marion Nestle once wrote an article entitled “The Farm Bill Drove Me Insane.” Luckily for me, UC Berkeley is the kind of place that offers a graduate seminar appropriately titled “Untangling the Farm Bill,” taught by Nina Ichikawa, director of Policy at the Berkeley Food Institute, and Professor Alastair Iles, whose work focuses on sustainable food systems, sustainability transitions, and greening chemicals.
The farm bill was designed to ensure a cheap and plentiful food supply for the US and protect farmers from price volatility. And it has done just that. Over time, the farm bill has moved away from the explicit subsidies that are often cited in popular conversation. Instead, the crop insurance title of the farm bill insures that if a crop fails, farmers will get a guaranteed price for the acres they’ve planted. The way most crop insurance works, payouts are attached to historical acreage and require that county-level benchmarks exist for the crops being grown. This means that if you’re growing something that isn’t a commodity crop in that region, then you can’t be insured. The 2014 Farm Bill introduced a new Whole Farm Revenue Protection (WFRP) policy provides coverage to diversified farms. The program has been popular among diversified farms and grown significantly since its introduction, but requires five years of tax records. Whole Farm Revenue Protection is a great example of grassroots organizations driving policy change.
The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), an alliance of grassroots organizations that advocates for federal policy reform, was a driving force behind the introduction of WFRP and many other policies supporting sustainable agriculture, including conservation programs and research programs.
Conservation programs are another area where significant policy change is required. In her book, Lentil Underground, Liz Carlisle describes how federal conservation programs pay more for farmers to keep their land out of production than they could get from cultivating the land regeneratively and actually restoring it. The conservation programs are based in the theory that cultivating land is inherently detrimental to the environment. With regenerative agriculture, cultivating the land actually restores its resilience. Federal programs should be adapted to reward regenerative cultivation. There are some great programs in place that support farmers, including value-added producer grants, EQIP, CRP, and beginning farmer programs. You can read more about these programs on the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) website — Grassroots Guide to Federal Farm and Food Programs. However, these programs are oversubscribed, underfunded, and could go much further in supporting regenerative agriculture.
Research and Extension are another important part of federal resources that are currently channeled toward chemical-industrial agriculture but should be redirected toward regenerative agriculture. The US has a system of land-grant universities which are partly funded to support agricultural research and provide farmer education services, known as extension services. Most research and extension has been directed toward developing higher-yielding crops that are optimized to work with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Redirected toward regenerative practices, our well-established extension system could be a powerful force for positive change. This is especially important because regenerative or agroecological practices must be developed for highly local conditions, so a local extension agent’s knowledge of practices that have been proven to work in a particular region would go a long way in reducing farmers’ risk when transitioning to new practices.
Trade Policy plays an important role in US farmer incentives. Historically, protecting farmers meant ensuring ample foreign markets for US agricultural products. These products are mostly staple crops that can be grown in large quantities to be trade on commodity markets. The diversity of products that are part of a regenerative system are not well-suited for these markets. Much of the US agricultural infrastructure is built up around the storage and transport of these type of commodities. Corn and soy accounted for 68% of harvest cropland in the US in 2017
(FAOSTAT). They were also the top two US agricultural export commodities in FY2018, with a combined value of $32.8B. Compare that to our top 2 import commodities, wine and coffee, with a combined value of $12.4B, and you start to see how important trade policy is to the US agricultural system (USDA ERS). Add to that the fact that corn is primarily not grown for human consumption, but rather for biofuel (40%) or feed (35%) (USDA ERS), and you can see how we need to think about food policy also in terms of how it relates to energy and meat consumption.
Unfortunately, trade policy is not an area that I understand well, but it is one that will need to change to support a more regenerative system, not only in the US but also abroad.
Carbon markets also require policy change and are a major area of opportunity for transitioning to regenerative. More on this here.
Practically speaking, while organizations like NSAC can drive a lot of change in federal policy, we do not need to rely on federal policy alone to transition policy. There are strong precedents for developing state-level policies that can spread nationwide (examples of this include the legalization of same-sex marriage and pro-life laws). In the US, California has a suite of Climate Smart Agriculture programs, including the Sustainable Agriculture Lands Conservation Program and the Healthy Soils Program. See the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN) for more info.
International policy
The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) is an international organization that has put together a great set of information about sustainable food systems and policy recommendations for change. Their 2016 report, From Uniformity to Diversity, is a comprehensive overview of each type of food system and provides policy recommendations including:
- Using new measurement indicators for agriculture that are based on ecosystem impacts rather than just yield. For example, measuring nutrient content / hectare, total biomass produced, ecosystem services delivered, and livelihood resilience
- Adjusting public policies to support agricultural diversity. An important way to do this is to convene food policy councils that represent a variety of interests to develop policy that supports the overall health of the food system rather than allowing policy to be directed by large agribusinesses invested in chemical-industrial agriculture. This includes redirecting governmental, intergovernmental (UN), and nongovernmental (NGO) research and education agendas to support agricultural diversity as well as using public procurement $ to support sustainably grown food, as Denmark has done.
- In nations with a large number of smallholder farmers, promote agroecological systems rather than monocropping chemical industrial systems. These smallholder farms are bound to transition to different types of farming over the next several decades, so there is a big opportunity to support the transition to agroecological systems. Agroecological systems help ensure farmer livelihoods by enhancing the resilience of farms against changing weather conditions like droughts, floods, and fires, as well as insulating farmers from the price volatility associated with monocropping a global commodity.
IPES-Food also advocates greater oversight of corporate agribusiness consolidation and warns that allowing these large business to have too much control puts our food system at risk.
Additional Reading:
This is part 4 of a series, written in January 2019
1. Introduction: The Magic of Regenerative Agriculture
3. Defining Regenerative and who’s doing it
5. Farm-level transitions (local learning and infrastructure)
6. Financing Regenerative Agricultural Transitions
